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I'm not so sure,you had plenty the shareware games and most of them were downloaded over a slow modem.
To have a Saturn with all those features in 97 would have been so special and at a much cheaper price point than PC and I gather very much like Joe Miller would have liked, since he was a big fan of the web.

A lot of shareware games were also distributed on Floppy disks. Sure you could download some small patch files and what not that were only a couple KB to a MB each. But you wouldn't need a 500MB HDD for that. Which is why I don't think it was meant to be there for consumers. If anything a much smaller and cheaper drive would be in there if it was for consumers. After all the Dreamcast got away with that kind of stuff just saving to the VMUs, and it had more reason to have a HDD with it since it had a much stronger online presence.

Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

Not sure th e HE would have been there for just development mind,since the development would have been done on PC.

You would still need to test your games on real hardware at some point. Having the ability to just swap in a HDD on consumer grade hardware would be a rather cheap and effective way to test without having to waste CD-Rs burning discs or having to pay for an expensive CD-ROM Drive emulator.

A lot of shareware games were also distributed on Floppy disks. Sure you could download some small patch files and what not that were only a couple KB to a MB each. But you wouldn't need a 500MB HDD for that. Which is why I don't think it was meant to be there for consumers. If anything a much smaller and cheaper drive would be in there if it was for consumers. After all the Dreamcast got away with that kind of stuff just saving to the VMUs, and it had more reason to have a HDD with it since it had a much stronger online presence.

You would still need to test your games on real hardware at some point. Having the ability to just swap in a HDD on consumer grade hardware would be a rather cheap and effective way to test without having to waste CD-Rs burning discs or having to pay for an expensive CD-ROM Drive emulator.

500 MB was probably the smallest they could buy at the time. I remember buying a new hard drive in 1996, I wanted to replace a dead drive in my 386 and figured 200 MB would be more than enough. I was shocked to find stores in my area didn't carry anything less than 850 MB and most were over 1GB. At the time it seemed huge!

500 MB was probably the smallest they could buy at the time. I remember buying a new hard drive in 1996, I wanted to replace a dead drive in my 386 and figured 200 MB would be more than enough. I was shocked to find stores in my area didn't carry anything less than 850 MB and most were over 1GB. At the time it seemed huge!

I'd imagine something smaller could have been ordered in bulk from the manufacturer, after all laptops and the like did ship with smaller drives around the time. Which again this seems to point more for it being for developers, not the end consumer. 500MB would be overkill in a console in 1996 just to store a couple MBs of downloaded files. You wouldn't be downloading full games back then over 28.8kbps internet after all. Installing games wouldn't be an option either as it's only enough to store 1 game at best, and I highly doubt Sega was going to sell games on HDDs.

It was most likely there in this unit as it was a prototype with developers using it. The option was probably there more for developers.

500 MB was probably the smallest they could buy at the time. I remember buying a new hard drive in 1996, I wanted to replace a dead drive in my 386 and figured 200 MB would be more than enough. I was shocked to find stores in my area didn't carry anything less than 850 MB and most were over 1GB. At the time it seemed huge!

Its all context though . My mates father had Alone In The Dark Downloaded on his PC on a 28k Modem (for the full game) . My 1st Modem was only 33k and one could still download a demo of Quake for it. That Pluto would have been an impressive system for 1997 and so much cheaper than a PC . I think my 1st Hard Drive was only 400 MB' Put Quake and another game on it and it was full up LOL

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I was downloading torrents using a 56k modem with an old Pentium II PC. It would take about an hour to download a 2MB file, because the torrents would drop down into the 10Kbps range.

A Black Falcon: no, computer games and video games are NOT the same thing. Video games are on consoles, computer games are on PC. The two kinds of games are different, and have significantly different design styles, distribution methods, and game genre selections. Computer gaming and console (video) gaming are NOT the same thing."

I'd imagine something smaller could have been ordered in bulk from the manufacturer, after all laptops and the like did ship with smaller drives around the time. Which again this seems to point more for it being for developers, not the end consumer. 500MB would be overkill in a console in 1996 just to store a couple MBs of downloaded files. You wouldn't be downloading full games back then over 28.8kbps internet after all. Installing games wouldn't be an option either as it's only enough to store 1 game at best, and I highly doubt Sega was going to sell games on HDDs.

It was most likely there in this unit as it was a prototype with developers using it. The option was probably there more for developers.

I agree it was most likely just for devs but if that did go into production you wouldn't need to load the entire game on it, just put a few MB of commonly used assets like a RAM cart. It also gives (for the time) nearly unlimited storage for saved games and would have been very useful for web browsing.
You are right capacities were lower for laptop drives but even by then I think they were starting around 540 MB for the 2.5" drives.
Also I'm curious how the drive and modem are connected in the Pluto -- it looks like a PCMCIA bus?